At first he came only with Spenser.Afterward, Spenser used to send him to dine with Susan and to spend the evenings with her when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere.When she was with Drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old tricks." Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea of treachery to his friend about a woman.Whenever Drumley heard that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it as a libel upon the empedestaled sex.If proofs beyond dispute were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success.He had been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and secure position and money put by.But the serious women who had set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him;as for the better looking and livelier women who had come a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing but professional loose characters.Thus his high ideal of feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared.
Toward the end of Spenser's first year on the _Herald_--it was early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so prolonged that Susan became alarmed.She was used to his having those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and dissipated life recur at brief intervals.He spent more and more time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together, with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched her to the depths.She had early learned to ignore his moods, to avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a vigorous counterirritant of liveliness.After watching the course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from Drumley what the cause was.Perhaps she could cure him if she were not working in the dark.
One June evening Drumley came to take her to dinner at the Casino in Central Park.She hesitated.She still liked Drumley's mind; but latterly he had fallen into the way of gazing furtively, with a repulsive tremulousness of his loose eyelids, at her form and at her ankles--especially at her ankles--especially at her ankles.This furtive debauch gave her a shivery sense of intrusion.She distinctly liked the candid, even the not too coarse, glances of the usual man.But not this shy peeping.However, as there were books she particularly wished to talk about with him, she accepted.
It was an excursion of which she was fond.They strolled along Seventh Avenue to the Park, entered and followed the lovely walk, quiet and green and odorous, to the Mall.They sauntered in the fading light up the broad Mall, with its roof of boughs of majestic trees, with its pale blue vistas of well-kept lawns.
At the steps leading to the Casino they paused to delight in the profusely blooming wistaria and to gaze away northward into and over what seemed an endless forest with towers and cupolas of castle and fortress and cathedral rising serene and graceful here and there above the sea of green.There was the sound of tinkling fountains, the musical chink-chink of harness chains of elegant equipages; on the Mall hundreds of children were playing furiously, to enjoy to the uttermost the last few moments before being snatched away to bed--and the birds were in the same hysterical state as they got ready for their evening song.The air was saturated with the fresh odors of spring and early summer flowers.Susan, walking beside the homely Drumley, was a charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood.The year and three months in New York had wrought the same transformations in her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city life.She had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure.There was a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes.Experience had increased the allure of her wide, beautifully curved mouth.
They took a table under the trees, with beds of blooming flowers on either hand.Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink--champagne and burgundy, half and half.He was running to poetry that evening--Keats and Swinburne.
Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson--"Iran across it today.It's the only thing of his worth while, Ibelieve--and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore when he read it because he hadn't thought to write it himself.
Its moral tone is not high, but it's so beautiful, Mrs.Susan, that I'll venture to show it to you.It comes nearer to expressing what men mean by the man sort of constancy than anything I ever read.Listen to this:
"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara!--the night is thine;And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire;I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."Susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times, handed it back to him without a word."Don't you think it fine?"asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman when the conversation touched the relations of the sexes--uneasy lest he might say or might have said something to send a shiver through her delicate modesty.
